Pharisaism, Its Aim and Its Method

by R. Travers Herford

What it amounts to is this, that the Torah was to be made, not merely in theory but in practice, a complete guide to life. The aim was to learn, from what God had revealed, His will in regard to every slightest action that a man might do. That could be learned from the Torah; and if it could be, it ought to be. No amount of study was too great, if, by that means, something more might be learned of how God willed that a man should live. Every fresh interpretation of the Torah, when once accepted as valid, was an extension of its meaning, or rather a transference of its meaning from the region of the unknown to the region of the known.

The result of this process was a detailed statement that such and such and such actions were to be done by anyone who would rightly serve God, because they were what God Himself had taught in the Torah, as being His will. This detailed rule of right conduct is what is denoted by the name Halachah.[3]

Halachah is the most conspicuous element in Pharisaism, partly because it was the object of its authors' most close and continuous thought, and partly because its results were immediately visible in the actions which it prescribed. It was the Halachah which gave rise to the common opinion that Torah is the same as Law. It is the Halachah which has laid the Pharisees open to so much misrepresentation and obloquy. And, if there was one thing more than another that a Pharisee would extol as divine, it was the Halachah; because it was to him the express direction of God how rightly to serve Him.

Evidently the greatest care would be needed in the interpretation of the Torah, to draw from it the right conclusion. If the result—the Halachah—was to be accepted as the divine teaching, made explicit upon such and such a point, it could not be left to chance or caprice to determine the form in which it should be expressed. It was not open to any teacher to give his own interpretation upon some point and straightway to say, "This is the Halachah," i.e. this is the Torah made explicit upon this subject. What was to be regarded as Halachah was only determined after careful deliberation, guided by the recorded opinion of earlier teachers, where known, and also by recognised rules of interpretation. The end proposed in such discussion was either to define in minuter detail some general rule of conduct derived from the Torah, or else to connect some already existing usage with the Torah so as to show that it had divine sanction. The masters of Halachah were not engaged upon the construction de novo of a system of ethics or a system of law. They were engaged in adjusting to the standard of Torah all the actions of life, so that in every one of them the divine will might be carried out. And when it appeared that such and such was the real meaning of Torah upon a given point, the Halachah ascertained by valid methods, then they were not free to decide otherwise upon that point. Which is only to say, what everyone must say, that he is not entitled to go against the authority which he personally regards as supreme.

The Halachah covered part of the ground which is usually occupied in a nation's life by the civil and criminal law. And this is another reason for the common identification of Torah with Law. Law there must be for the regulations of social life, the performance of contracts, the prevention of crime, and the like. The Jews needed a civil and criminal law, as any civilised people needs it. And though in certain respects they were subject to the Roman law, (at all events in the time of the Pharisees and the Rabbis), yet they devised a system of their own, because they would have their law based on the Torah. The Roman government they obeyed from compulsion; to the Torah they gave the full allegiance of heart and will. The Halachah accordingly is, to a large extent, a system of civil and criminal law based upon, or derived from, the Torah, and resting for its sanction upon the divine revelation therein contained. And if the Halachah, in dealing with such subjects as must be dealt with in a code of civil and criminal law, goes into minute detail, makes subtle distinctions, draws very fine lines between what is and what is not lawful, it only does what any adequate system of law is bound to do. And to say that the mass of detail and minute precept of the Halachah was, or must have been, oppressive to the ordinary Jew, is as true, or untrue, as to say that the ordinary Englishman is oppressed by the mass of detail and minute precept in the body of statute and common law by which his actions as a citizen are regulated, and which he is presumed to know. In the one case, as in the other, certain lines are defined by a recognised authority, for the regulation of action; but for any given person, it is seldom that he will be in a position to feel the constraint, or expressly to seek the permission, of the greater number of the laws under which he lives. If he is in that position, then the Englishman under the statute and common law, equally with the Pharisee under the Halachah, acknowledges a rule of conduct having authority over him, and not to be disobeyed with impunity. And the main difference is that, to the Jew, the authority of the Halachah was the authority of the Torah, and the Torah was the revelation of God. So that, to the Jew, the code of civil and criminal law was specifically sacred in a way that it is not to the Englishman.

But the Halachah, as the reader will wish to remind me, came very much more closely home to the Jew than a code of civil and criminal law could do. It was the rule of his private and domestic life, it defined his conduct both towards God and his fellow-man. Certainly it did. And the Pharisee would say, "Why not? Do I not need to serve God in everything I do, however small? And if the Torah can teach me exactly—yes, very exactly—what is most pleasing to Him, shall I not thankfully receive that teaching, and the more of it the better?" On this theory, it can easily be seen that there is no real distinction of great and small, important and trivial, in the things that are done in accordance with Halachah, because, in each case, what was done was regarded as a doing of God's will. In themselves, and apart from that, actions were trivial or important, great or small, and the Pharisees knew perfectly well that they were. But the Pharisee never regarded the mere doing of the action as sufficient; in all and every case there must be the purpose of serving God, the intention of pleasing Him. If he were assured that God had directed such and such a thing to be done, in a given case, then he would not say, "This is a trivial thing," or "This is a great thing"; but, "This is precisely what God would have me do at this moment and under these circumstances," and he felt a joy in doing it as exactly as he could. All this is widely different from what Christians are accustomed to, in determining their actions; but my object is to make clear the point of view of the Pharisees, and to show that on the lines of their theory they were perfectly justified in those precise definitions of conduct, even in matters which on other lines would be considered trifling. However small might be the details upon which the Halachah was defined, it was still Torah that enjoined the doing of the action in this way and not in that way, though, on the face of it, there might seem to be no reason to do it in one way rather than another. And the authority of Halachah was the will of God. It is easy to pick out from the Mishnah instances of minute regulation upon points of no apparent importance—such, for instance, as the rules for dealing with an egg laid upon the Sabbath. If a Pharisee were challenged upon that, or any similar case, he would say: "The Torah, the divine revelation, extends over the whole of life; and its principles, when drawn out and applied to that particular case, yield the results stated in the Halachah, bearing thereon. The divine will is taught me in regard to that; and what concerns me is the doing of the divine will, and not the smallness of the occasion in regard to which I do it."

The duties enjoined in the Halachah were called "Mitzvōth," i.e. commandments. And the essence of a "mitzvah" was that it was a thing which God willed to have done. It was an occasion of service, a means offered to man by which he could in a given instance please God. Therefore the Pharisee delighted in being able to perform a "mitzvah"; and it never occurred to him that he was burdened by the weight or oppressed by the number of them. "The 'Mitzvōth,'" said a famous Rabbi, "were only given in order to purify Israel. The things commanded made no difference to God" (Rab, in Ber. R. § 44, p. 89ª). They were so many opportunities given, by the sheer kindness of God, for man to do his Maker's will. Why God should be pleased to direct that such things should be done just in that way and in no other, it was not for man to inquire. All that he had to do was to take the opportunity, and serve God in the manner which God enjoined. Merely to do the action, without the conscious assent of his will and the devotion of his heart, was no fulfilment of his duty; for what God desired was the harmony of the human soul with Himself in willing obedience, and not that, for instance, just 2000 cubits and no more should be the extent of a Sabbath day's walk.

R. Joḥanan b. Zaccai, a contemporary of Jesus, was once asked what was the reason for performing all the ritual of the sacrifices, and the other minutiæ of the ceremonial law. He answered: "A corpse does not defile, and waters do not cleanse. But it is a decree of the King of kings. The Holy One, blessed be He, hath said, 'I have ordained my statute; I have decreed my decree. Man is not entitled to transgress my decree.' As it is written (Num. xix. 2), 'This is the decree of the Torah'" (Pesikta 40^b). That is a far-reaching saying, and gives the clue to the whole meaning of the Halachah, as the rule of right conduct deduced from the Torah, and applied by the Pharisees.

It is obvious that a theory like that lends itself to abuse, because it makes a severe demand for constant devotion on the part of the man who lives under it. Undoubtedly it could, and in some cases it did, lead to that mere formalism and hypocrisy which have been charged upon the Pharisees as a class. The Pharisees themselves were perfectly well aware of the danger, and that it was not always successfully averted. But most distinctly, such formalism and hypocrisy were only the perversion of Pharisaism and not inherent in it. And not only so, but for the Pharisees as a class, on their own showing in the Talmud, the Halachah, with its abundant "Mitzvōth," was felt to be a help and not a hindrance to him who would walk with God, a joy and not a burden.

The Pharisees, as was explained in the previous chapter, were those in their time who interpreted most strictly the Torah which in some degree all Jews recognised. It was they who worked out the Halachah, as it was they who carried out its principle into the minutest details of practice. On their theory of Torah, it was clearly their duty to be as precise as they were in their food and their dress, in the "tithing of mint, anise, and cumin," the wearing of their phylacteries just so and not otherwise, in their scrupulous regard to "clean" and "unclean," "lawful" and "forbidden," and the like. And it was only for the sake of being in a position to carry out more fully what they deemed to be the will of God, in all these and many other matters, that they separated themselves from those who were less careful, and formed themselves into groups, societies, companionships, as they called them (Ḥabūrōth). That separation is indicated by the name applied to them, Pherūshim, or Pharishaia in the common Aramaic speech. Their own name for themselves and each other was "Ḥaberim," "companions," as they were "banded together for a full obedience" to what God had enjoined in the Torah.